Mathematics Knows No Races Or

One Can Measure The Importance Of A Scientific Work By The Number Of Earlier Publications Rendered Superfluous By It

We Do Not Master A Scientific Theory Until We Have Shelled And Completely Prised Free Its Mathematical Kernel.

Mathematics Is A Presuppositionless Science. To Found It I Do Not Need God, As Does Kronecker, Or The Assumption Of A Special Faculty Of Our Understanding Attuned To The Principle Of Mathematical Induction, As Does Poincaré, Or The Primal Intuition Of Brouwer, Or, Finally, As Do Russell And Whitehead, Axioms Of Infinity, Reducibility, Or Completeness, Which In Fact Are Actual, Contentual Assumptions That Cannot Be Compensated For By Consistency Proofs.

Sometimes It Happens That A Man's Circle Of Horizon Becomes Smaller And Smaller, And As The Radius Approaches Zero It Concentrates On One Point. And Then That Becomes His Point Of View.

I Do Not Want To Presuppose Anything As Known. I See In My Explanation In Section 1 The Definition Of The Concepts Point, Straight Line And Plane, If One Adds To These All The Axioms Of Groups I-v As Characteristics. If One Is Looking For Other Definitions Of Point, Perhaps By Means Of Paraphrase In Terms Of Extensionless, Etc., Then, Of Course, I Would Most Decidedly Have To Oppose Such An Enterprise. One Is Then Looking For Something That Can Never Be Found, For There Is Nothing There, And Everything Gets Lost, Becomes Confused And Vague, And Degenerates Into A Game Of Hide And Seek.